Relation To Hacking Culture
In early 1971, a former Air Force electronics technician named John Draper (later self-nicknamed Captain Crunch, Crunch, Crunchman, or Mr. Crunchtastic) was informed by his phone phreak friend Joe Engressia that a toy whistle that was, at the time, packaged in boxes of the cereal could be easily modified to emit a tone at precisely 2600 Hertz, the same frequency that was used by AT&T long lines to indicate that a trunk line was ready to route a new call. This would effectively disconnect one end of the trunk, allowing the still-connected side to enter an operator mode. This resulted in, among other things, the ability to place free phone calls to anywhere in the world and operator-like control over the phone system. Experimenting with this whistle inspired Draper to build blue boxes, electronic devices capable of reproducing this 2600 Hz tone and other tones required to control trunk lines. After being featured, under his pseudonym of Captain Crunch, in an article in the October 1971 issue of Esquire Magazine titled "Secrets of the Little Blue Box", he was sentenced in 1972 to five years’ probation for toll fraud.
Read more about this topic: Cap'n Crunch
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